TheMillerCircle.org

In Alan Greenspan’s memoirs, published last year, he stung the Bush White House with his phrase “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He repeated this comment many times and in doing so presented the counter view to all the reasons that Bush and Cheney had used to hype us into the war. But the new oil contracts that will be given to Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total have confirmed that Greenspan was right all along. Even if you believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, you surely would acknowledge that Bush and Cheney would never have invaded Iraq if the country didn’t have oil and lots of it. You might recall that Rumsfeld was content to let the entire country be raped and pillaged, including Iraq’s precious museums, while he insured that the Oil Ministry was immediately surrounded and heavily guarded (one of Iraq’s precious museums is now under blacktop for a US military base). It was about the only thing that the invasionary force targeted for protection.

Four decades after Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil supply and kicked out the oil giants that had taken control of Iraq’s oil after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW I, the same group will be returning. As Yogi Berra said, "It’s déjà vu all over again." And, their presence will require protection, something that is likely to tie up US troops for many years to come. Perhaps this is the Bush/Cheney good bye present to the USA. Who said imperialism is dead? Iraq’s oil fields are believed to contain the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Only the Saudis have more reserves. But those oil fields have been under constraints by UN sanctions and Iraq’s infrastructure for oil production has been seriously eroded. Thus, the initial no-bid contracts will be for the southern oil fields and are primarily for improving the oil production capability. Yet, ordinarily such contracts would be given to smaller, specialized companies for this purpose. The Iraqi National Oil Company (Inoc) is too corrupt and inefficient to accomplish these improvements on their own but Iraq’s oil minister, Hussein Shahristani, claims that, with these no-bid contracts, Iraq is not surrendering sovereignty over her oil and the lifeblood of her future. After all, we have made sure that the entire country needs to be rebuilt. This contract will presumably lead to an immediate increase in oil production of about 500,000 barrels a day, adding to Iraq’s current oil production of about 2.5 million barrels/day. Although these initial contracts are only for two years, the Western recipients are assuming that this will given them leverage for future long-term contracts and profitability.

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Almost completely unknown to the public, and seemingly outside of the purview of the mainstream media, the Pentagon has continued lockstep in its march and preparation for " the long war." Stimulated by the events of 9/11, the Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld, pursued the policy that America’s response to those events would be purely a military response, as outlined by the neocons and as befitting a great military empire. Fortress America continues to advance. The Pentagon continues its preparation for a confrontation with Iran and we have a president who does not think any more authority from Congress is needed to launch military actions. He is further emboldened by a Congress that refuses to challenge him on the budget, as he continues to talk about a declining budget deficit, created by not including the costs of the Iraq war in the calculation. As president, at least for Republican presidents, you are given so much freedom for your actions that accountability is not a serious issue and not something that anyone in the White House seems to worry about. Apparently those that once did are now gone.

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William Polk served in the Kennedy administration and later as a history professor at the University of Chicago. Trained at Harvard and Oxford, he is currently the director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. I have read several of his books and find that he writes with clarity and deep knowledge of the Middle East and its history. As someone who lived through the Cuban Missile crisis he also has an understanding of national crisis management and warfare. Today, he has written an editorial for Juan Cole’s blog sheet and expresses his deep concerns about the dangers and the damage we are doing and have done to our country derived from the Iraq war. His concerns include the huge cost of injury to our soldiers and the enormous costs of their lifelong care, the use of depleted uranium for armaments, which transforms into uranium oxide and gets into the lungs of those in the region, to become a serious neurotoxin, fragmenting DNA and causing cancer. He is not talking about the reasons we got into the war, but rather about how poorly we view what terrorism is all about, how terrorism exists when only a small percent of the population are committed to it and how dangerous it is for our country and its future to view terrorism as something we can wipe out, given the nature of terrorism itself, which has so far not been properly understood by this administration or the country.

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